Monday, June 22, 2020

Republicans Versus the Race Party...I Mean the Democrats: Part II - 1825-1854 > > > [re-issue]

Welcome back the Gauntlet of Balthazar for a re-issue of "Republicans Versus the Race Party...I Mean the Democrats Part II: 1825-1854", now broken up into smaller segments, and methodically tracing the evolution of political party philosophy in the United States from the founding until the present day.

Within reason the premise of this series of posts is to demonstrate that there has been only two dominant political trains of thought throughout our history - those being, Pro-Central Government versus the Liberty of Individual Rights. It is my contention that the push and pull of these philosophies is, and has been, an intra-party struggle within the Republican Party, while the primary focus of the Democratic Party was, and still currently is - simply race. From the DNC's founding as the pro-slavery party in the 1830's, to  being the party of anti-desegregation in the 1960's, and currently fomenting division by plying Marxist Intersectional race, class and gender warfare initiatives, race politics has served as the primary means (hand-in-hand with Globalist Corporatism) by which the DNC has cemented its power base.

So, let's return to the methodical march through time and pick up the next phase of American political history with the election of 1824.
  
Part Two: 1825-1854 (Republicans, Whigs and the Pro-Slavery Party)

The first great internal watershed of doctrinaire proportions that shook the political landscape of America was the election of 1824 - which pitted an ardent Federalist, John Quincy Adams - the son of Federalist Party founder, John Adams, against a southern populist war hero known as Andrew Jackson.

Reformulated themselves into the National Republican Party, and headed by J.Q. Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay, the NRP was initially referred to the Adams-Clay Republicans in order to differentiate themselves from the Jeffersonian Republicans - but these were clearly Federalists. The National Republican Party was in essence the fusion of the earlier Democratic-Republican party and the Federalist party - the once bitter rivals agreeing on one thing: that Jackson and his ilk had to go!

While Adams won the 1824 election, he savagely lost the election of 1828 election to Andrew Jackson. The Jackson camp (the Jacksonian's) quickly adopted the moniker "the Democratic Party", and the origin of the current political party of the same name dates from that year. If we are to believe their rhetoric (and wikipedia) there is an unbroken line of thought here, or at least that is what we are led to believe. True, Jackson attacked the institution of central banking as an evil, and in that he was largely correct, and within reason the DNC did indeed inherit many of the socially left ideals of Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. But more so the Jacksonian's utilized the individualism of the platform and states rights sovereignty to justify and support the continuation of their most prized issue - the institution of slavery in the south (and Native American culturcide and genocide, if we're being fully forthcoming).

Having lost to Jackson in the 1828-1837 period, The National Republicans went into a tailspin, but in the long run the defeat galvanized them into a stronger platform, gathering their former members together with disaffected Democrats, as well as the Anti-Masonic Party - which supplied a strong third-party alternative to Jackson in the 1828 election. Honestly, by today's standards the Anti-Masons would frankly seem at home with the conspiracy theorists and the soft Alt-Right, or at least "Alt-lite". Nonetheless, these three streams all coalesced into what was called the Whig Party, which formalized itself in 1833. Indeed, such was the appeal of the party that four US Presidents after Jackson were Whigs.

As a party the Whigs (or "Clay" Whigs) took their name from the powdered wigs that the colonial founders sported, belying their pride in the revolution and their patriotism. They were a center-right party, which favored economic interventionist policies such as protective tariffs, national infrastructure development, and an "America First" outlook (sound familiar?). Unlike the earlier regional divisions of the parties, the Whigs had supporters in both the north and the south, notably from the entrepreneurial class. Due to this, or maybe because of this, the Whigs opted to not have a strong platform regarding slavery, either way, and chose to kind of ignore it.

By today's standards I feel that the closest parallel to the Whig Party of the 1840's would be to that of the Tea Party movement of the early 2000's. Both were Federalists, but not extremely so. Both were Classical Liberals - with a Conservative streak. And both prized Entrepreneurial Capitalism but not war- mongering and Corporatism, and I like to imagine that the Whigs and the Tea Party would have shared a similar heartfelt disdain for Neo-Con's (and Neo-Lib's).

I personally like to think of myself as a bit of a Whig, and if President Donald Trump thought about it, he would too, even though his brand of populism has had a similar divisive effect on the opposition party and the media-indoctrinated partisan populace as Jackson did in his time.

As you might have premeditated, I'm about to talk about Whigs "chicken's coming home to roost" effect due to their avoidance to taking a stand on the slavery issue. And if you did guess that, you'd be absolutely right.

You see, it was due to, or maybe because of the neutral approach the Whig's took on the issue of slavery, that several single-issue abolitionist splinter parties came into existence in the 1840's - such as the Liberty Party (1840-1848), who responded to southern Democrats (and somewhat northern Democrats) who were pushing for the expansion of slavery in the newly acquired south-western territories. Ironically, Southern Whig's leaned to being even more pro-slavery than their Democratic Party counterparts in either the south or north, while Northern Whigs tended to being more anti-slavery than Northern Democrats. However, as Southern Democrats started to suggest the concept of secession over the issue of slavery, Southern Whigs moved away - their Federalist-born national patriotism being more important than what was in many ways seen as a "regional issue".

However, slavery was of course not just a regional issue, it was a moral issue. So, in the end, morality caught up with the Whigs, who promptly divided into two major factions: the anti-slavery Conscience Whigs and the Pro-Southern Cotton Whigs. While the Conscience Whigs were noted for their opposition to slavery on moral grounds, the Cotton Whig's association with the New England textile industry led them to consistently downplay the slavery issue. During the 1850s, several Conscience leaders played an important role in the founding of the Republican Party - displaying the abolitionist stream of Republican thought even prior to the technical founding of the party.

It should be mentioned that the Whigs and their denial of the issue of slavery first led to them loosing elections, and finally to a collapse, and then dissolution in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This led to a reunification or a re-absorption of their party back into the National Republican Party. Likewise such were the times that the Liberty Party, the Conscience Whigs, and many Barnburner Democrats (who left the DNC), soon formed the Free Soil Party in 1852 - a centrist anti-slavery political party. No shock here - the Free Soil Party and the NRP then merged on March 20th, 1854 to form the GOP (Grand Old Party) then as now known simply as the Republican Party.

I should make it clear that the Democrats were not immune to the push and pull of the slavery issue, and at least in the north, a radical anti-slavery wing of the Democratic Party called the Barnburners, or Barnburner Democrats came into being. They were opposed within the party by a group called the Hunkers. The Barnburners (like current fiscal Conservatives) while not against large entrepreneurial businesses, opposed expanding the national debt and aggrandizing the power of large state-subsidized corporations. They also stood for local control, as did the Jeffersonian's. The Hunkers also wished to minimize the issue of slavery, like the Northern Whigs, but unlike the Federalists they favored state banks rather than a national bank.

While Democrats of the time insisted they were still less socially Conservative than Republicans, and reflected some of the leftist leanings of Jefferson's original Democratic-Republican Party (minus the moral qualms over slavery), just as at it's inception under Jackson, the issue of race (and pro-slavery) became the purview of the Democratic Party leading up to, and after, the Civil War.

In retrospect it is clear that the Democrats of the 1824-1854 period only supported states rights in order to insure that African-American's would not be freed, and that Native American land could be freely confiscated. Add to that their Anti-Catholicism, and it should come as no surprise why the DNC would later come to be the home of secessionists, anti-de-segregationists, eugenicists, and the KKK until the 1980's, and is in my opinion a political party that is currently still obsessed with race in the form of post-modern language deconstruction, Marxist intersectionality and identity politics.

But that's for the later posts in this series.

Till next time.

Thursday, June 18, 2020

The Gauntlet Celebrates A Happy 20,000th Page Visit!

Hello again and welcome to the mysterious Gauntlet of Balthazar's humble, but nevertheless celebratory, 20,000th page view post.

In general I'd like to thank everyone who has visited the site over the last few years, but in particular I'd like to extend a particular appreciation to recent readers in East Asia. From Japan to Thailand, from South Korea to China, and especially to Hong Kong, the swell of interest has been awesome, and I expect that in Hong Kong's case, the Gauntlet's penchant for all things liberty (as well as anti-Communism and anti-cultural Marxism) has been a driving factor in this mounting appeal.

While the G.O.B. has only logged offhand support for pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, and has not filed repeating and elaborate articles about the protests, be assured that the Gauntlet has its many hats off to those who stand opposed to any conformist oligarchic bureaucracy - in this case the post-Maoist / faux Capitalist surveillance state of President Xi Jinping and his junta of Crypto-Confucian economic colonizers. Sorry if that bothers our kindly readers in China, but frankly, I imagine that you are more in line with the Gauntlet's Hong Kong faction, if you're not an extension thereof. Then again, who knows?

Anyway, as usual, work continues on scripts, music, and films, as well as forthcoming posts here, so please stay tuned, and comment if you are driven so, and subscribe if you like. Also, not to beat a dead horse, but please do subscribe to Nevekari Enterprise's Youtube Channel. Thanks so much!

Till next time.

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Republicans Versus the Race Party...I Mean the Democrats: Part I: 1789-1824 > > > [re-issue]

Introduction 

In the age of legacy media and alternative information fighting for segments of political narrative dom- inance, if not serving as press arms for the dominant political parties of the US, it is illuminating to study how these structures came about, what they stood and / or stand for, and how they evolved over time.

As a person who was firmly on the left as a very young man, and has leaned right since about the age of twenty, I have come to feel that many of us accept certain narratives and doctrines based more on our perception of the parties that claim to represent them, and our self-images of course, rather than by identification with specific platform points and philosophies.

Growing up in New York City, the all but overt messaging I received as a general sensibility was that the Democratic Party was, well...they were "normal". They were clearly the "good guys", and certainly, one should only vote for them, because to not - was just crazy. I mean, the Republicans were just horrible, horrible people (don't you know?). It was an unspoken truth that they were thoroughly deplorable, in every way, long before Hillary Clinton deemed everyone to the right of her position as such in the 2015 election cycle.

Ironically, what many fail to understand is that the corrupt Madame Secretary had long since gone through her own political evolution - not unalike millions of others in her generation and since. From a Goldwater Republican as a teenager, Miss Rodham fell under the spell of Socialist agitator Saul Alinsky, and as she drifted into the Democratic Party, she, like many other liberals of her generation, brought far left radicalism into the establishment.

This toxic combination of Marxist-tinged leftist ideology being baked in a slow admixture with the military-industrial complex, led to the creation of a type of creature that is now commonly called a "Neo-Liberal", or "Neo-Lib" in contemporary social parlance. This concoction of victim politics and Corporatism created a bi-polar dissonance (i.e Woke CEO's) that achieved a kleptocratic high point in the 1990's - as many former hippies traded in their moccasins and hoodies for patent leather shoes and Chanel business suits. It's no coincidence that this high point matured during the Clinton administration, and was paralleled on the right side of the aisle by, you got it, the "Neo-Conservatives", or in short, the "Neo-Cons" - an equally despicable creature.

For those of you who I might have lost in the last passage I must explain that these euphemisms do not simple refer to renewed ("Neo") waves of Liberal and Conservative ideals - they instead refer to a new set of ideals, much in the same way that breeding a horse with a donkey creates a mule - it doesn't make a horse-donkey, or donkey-horse.

So we have Neo-Libs and Neo-Cons, as well as traditional Democrats and Republicans, as the dominant forces in America's two-party system. But where do these ideologies originate from?

In this series of posts I will attempt to encapsulate in a very abbreviated form (but hopefully scholarly enough) how these ideas came into being, effected, and responded to one another over time.

My thesis in short will illuminate how the two major and recurring themes of American politics: Federalism and Anti-Federalism (i.e how much or little control the government has over individual, local and state issues) has really only been a debate within the Republican camp from 1789 until the present, while a platform primarily built upon ethno-identitarianism and Marxist identitarianism (i.e. race) has always been the purview of the Democratic Party, from its founding until now.   

If we are able to recall our early school days, we  might remember studying the founding fathers and their nascent political alliances. In that, two particular opposing streams of thought stand out - Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans and John Adam's Federalists. While it would be very easy to picture that our current RNC and DNC and the direct heirs to these two parties, it is by no means that simple. In fact, I would argue that the notion that such is the case is a retro-active deception and a century old historical re-write created in order to clean up the sordid origins of the Democratic Party.

So let's go back to the very start and see how we got here.

Part One: 1789-1824 (Republicanism versus Federalism)

In the aftermath of the ratification of the US constitution and of George Washington's "independent" or at least "non-partisan" presidency, the Democratic-Republican Party was founded by President Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1792. It found support mostly in the southern states, and was in essence the successor of the Anti-Administration Party which had formed in 1789 and was dissolved in 1794. The party reflected the core beliefs of "Jeffersonian Democracy" (Jeffersonian Era 1801- 1817), which prized above all civic service.

The values of Republicanism opposed aristocracy, monarchy, central banking, the religious authority, and corruption. Within reason, it can be described as a socially center-left form of Classical Liberalism (i.e. the liberal ideals of the Enlighten- ment), and if we attempt to find a contemporary political parallels to it, I would suggest it maintained many common- alities with Libertarian thought, if not the current Libertarian Party - which in my opinion, has not yet adequately pieced together an holistic platform that would appeal to both right and left Libertarians.

The counter to both the Anti-Administration party and to the Democratic-Republican party was John Adam's and Alexander Hamilton's Pro-Administration party, better known as the Federalist Party, or simply, the Federalists (Federalist Era 1788-1801). The Federalist Party also formed in 1789, but unlike the Democratic-Republicans it found most of it's base in the chilly states of New England. The Federalist position was that government was innately an evil, but a necessary one, and thus, it should be regulated by a strong legal framework. Within reason, as a party the Federalists relied on traditional family and religious values and centralization of power and finances. Philosophically, it was both socially and fiscally more Conservative than the Jeffersonians, and would be best described as a center-right wing branch of Classical Liberalism, placing it firmly in the arena of most of today's Neo-Con's.

From the beginning the debate was always between how much, or how little, the newly created national government of the United States would, well, govern. States rights and the individual rights of man versus how much power the national government could, would, or should exert. I guess it was, and is, a bit of a pickle.

Both sides promoted their doctrines and opinions with the passionate zeal of devotees to a new faith, and before long the rivalry between the two parties became so extreme that duels in the name of the argument were taking place. The most epic and notable of these decades-long grudges was a pistol face-off between Federalist Alexander Hamilton and Jefferson's second Vice-President, Aaron Burr, who shot the prior to death in 1804. Burr was never charged, but it should be added that the duel ended his political career.

At the time, and until the Civil War, we must recall that often the President and Vice-President represented the opposing parties, with the loser of the electoral college taking the lesser seat. In a mythical construct where political civility reigned this sounds idealistically non-partisan and just wonderful. But in reality, this was not possible after the bitterness brought on by the north-south / Republican-Democratic schism and the Civil War that grew from it. But more on that later.

Regardless, the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican parties were both dissolved in the election of 1824 and morphed into very different creatures. However, the threads of their philosophy and streams of their thought both persisted and can be traced in some way until the current day.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

From the Writer's Studio: Character Design and the Myers-Briggs (Personality) Type Indicator

Hello everyone and welcome back to the enigma that is the Gauntlet of Balthazar for yet another installment of the "From the Writer's Studio" feature, and a look at the origin, design, and evolution of fictional characters that appear primarily in screenplays, and their relationship to the Myers-Briggs (Personality) Type Indicator test, commonly called the MBTI.

For those of you who are unaware, the MBTI, unlike thousands of contemporary social media "quizzes" and "tests", asks the user fairly impartial questions about how they perceive themselves, how they interact with the world, and what they consider their place in it is.

While many political compass tests can possess bias based on who authored the questions, and Mensa's testing system is heavily based on impartial math problems, the Myers-Briggs test is both very concrete while it is still considered pseudo-scientific, as a part of field of psychology...formerly a school of philosophy, and not medicine.

This is, I think, is a pretty straight-forward and common sense article, but it does require a few disclaimers - so here it goes.

 MBTI DISCLAIMERS

Firstly, the explanation. According to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator page on Wikipedia: "The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The original versions of the MBTI were constructed by two Americans, Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. The MBTI is based on the conceptual theory proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who had speculated that people experience the world using four principal psychological functions – sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking – and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time. The four categories are Introversion / Extraversion, Sensing / Intuition, Thinking / Feeling, Judging / Perception. Each person is said to have one preferred quality from each category, producing 16 unique types".

Secondly, if you are a fiction novelist, writer and / or screenwriter, (either beginning, or polished), I can't encourage you enough to not to attempt to design a character or characters by using the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator as a template. This is not a refutation of the usefulness or validity of the MBTI, quite the contrary, but I believe that the attributes of the system should only be applied and played-into after the initial creative design of a character has already been well-established in your mind and "on paper".

Thirdly, I must confess that I personally feel that I "channel" characters and stories from "somewhere else" (i.e. "inspiration - don't let this freak you out"), but in a very practical way, characters materialize in order to fill a gap in a story-line, or to fill a niche in a character ensemble, as well as augmenting other characters by their relationship to them. This is no different than the addition of a new color, or mix of colors, in order to advance the palette of a fine art painter. Regardless, even if the painting turns out to be black and white, the "blueprint" of the canvas is what gives the forthcoming painting its form and direction. Therefore, I believe that your work will benefit if you respect the spark of creation and run with your initial sense of who the person that you've just created is.

THE PITFALLS OF MISMANAGED CHARACTER DESIGN

Sadly, many writers often start by describing the surface attributes of a characters "credentials" rather than by pondering their operative psychological dynamic and / or personality type. Here's a test to see if you have been guilty of this crime. Example: If you end up talking to someone about a character in one of your scripts or novels and they ask you, "So, what's she like?" and you reply by citing their job title (i.e. "She's a secretary") and have a hard time going deeper, then you already know that you haven't thought the character out enough, yet. It's fine to create a bio-list of the basic information about a character, but to me, it's much more important to understand the psychology and psychological motivations of the character.

The next mistake many writers make, after the above shortfall, which we can call, "a surface gloss", is by inserting personality tropes, rather than actual motivations that interplay with their character and play out in regard to their character arc withing the overall story arc. I would call that phenomena "superimposed attribution", but it could equally be called "stereotyping". The inclusion of these elements are often powered by external and transitory notions and extra-literary political polemic, which speak volumes for a period (and maybe your career), but in the long run, will not age well.

Never forget, what is today's hot button issue is tomorrows cringe.

If you introduced a new character into your story or script, and you started off by saying something like, "I want this character to be a strong, empowered woman", rather than creating a strong character who just so happens to be a strong, empowered woman (get the distinction?), you are guilty of this and will probably end up with a cardboard character and virtue-signalling mess on your hands. In other words: A non-person. There are of course ways to remedy this issue, but you will have to ask to yourself some serious questions about your work and the character you've created.

The questions you should ask are: In what way is she strong? What event, or events forced her to gain this attribute? If she is empowered, then in what ways was she previously dis-empowered? Is this a stereotype of empowerment, or is it a real journey...part of her back-story and character arc? And lastly, are her attributes of empowerment and strength the same thing, are they related, or are they separate elements? I mean, just writing a female character who can open a pickle jar for herself and constantly touts her capabilities, but possesses only the slightest discernible motivations or story arc and contributes the barest minimum to the overall plot, is at best tiresome to ingest, and at worst is a colossal waste of reading or viewing time. I would argue that creating this sort of cardboard character actually does a disservice to women, and is flat-out sexist, even if the initial intention was pro-female. Frankly, I feel the best way to write and design characters is in an egalitarian manner, but that's just me.

NOW THAT YOU HAVE YOUR CHARACTER, YOU ALREADY KNOW THEIR MBTI

Once you grasp the niche your character occupies in your script or novel, as well as possessing an intimate understanding of who he or she is as a person, the character's dialogue you craft will not only give form to their identity and attributes, but you will learn from the character where they fall on the MBTI scale.

For example, if your character is obsessed with looking out for another character because they remind him or her of their dead sibling, then their dialogue should not only betray this motivation, but in the way it's crafted you will see if the character is an introvert or extrovert, an intuitive or sensitive, a thinker or feeler, or if their interaction with the world is based on their perceptions or by their judgement.

If your character's motivations, thoughts, feelings, (and their MBTI) are not expressed through their words and actions, and require internal explanation or are meant to be inferred, then you have flat-out failed, (at least as far as screenplay writing goes), and will be told this by anyone who knows anything about scripts. There's no other way to look at it.

For me, once I know a character intimately, their dialogue flows very naturally and it becomes very quickly impossible to place dialogue in their mouths that they as a person would just not say. I would almost say that the dialogue then "writes itself", but hey, I have to take some credit for it.

Obviously, the Myer-Briggs Personality Type Indicator is not a scale that is sealed in concrete or laminated, and all of the attributes are distributed in gradients, and play against one another, and so someone can be very extroverted...for an introvert, or vice versa, etc., etc.

You get the idea. 

THE MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR IN WELL-KNOWN FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

In the world of MBTI aficionados there is a long-established premise that many cinematic villains are INTJ's - which is my personality type according to the test (Yikes!). This of course makes a lot of sense because, unlike a simple story antagonist, the villain (who is essentially a "hyper-antagonist"), usually possesses a well-thought-out grand plan. Villains need to be intuitive so they can see the big picture, they need to be a thinker but could be feelers (if they're damaged), and they invariably trust their ability to form judgements over perceiving the peripherals. So there's your N, your T and your J. This means the biggest variable for villains is usually the introvert / extrovert element.

So let's look at some examples (kind of whatever struck me) of heroes, anti-heroes, and villains and their MBTI.

1. The world's first literary hero-protagonist, Gilgamesh; depicted in various ancient Mesopotamian texts about four-thousand years ago, is a rambunctious part-God city-state King who selfishly abuses his power, and who is metallic to working in the best interest of his people. Through the evolution of his lengthy story-arc he comes to know true friendship, becomes an introspective seeker of wisdom, experiences personal loss, comes to embrace selflessness, and ends up being a better King and a better man for it.

While Gilgamesh does change over time, he is at his core an extrovert (to the point of almost being confrontational), and is never presented at balking at being at the center of attention. He is likewise a sensitive, not an intuitive, and even when he has questions, he seeks others to supply the answer for him. He is however decisive in action, (a useful attribute for a character that self-initiates elaborate quests) and therefore this probably stems from his emotions rather than a methodical and thought out agenda. Gilgamesh also has no problem forming an opinion of others or situations, and this attribute is clearly more dominant that his overall perceptiveness. Thus, Gilgamesh, unless I'm mistaken, is an ESFJ.

2. Now, as I said before, someone can be a very extroverted introvert, but it's just as likely that a villain could be an introverted extrovert. For example, a consummate "showman" like Superman's arch-nemesis Lex Luthor, is clearly an extrovert (in addition to displaying some elements of psychosis and dips in sociopath inclination), so by my estimation Lex Luthor reads as an ENTJ, unless I'm mistaken.

3. Rick Blaine, the protagonist of classic film Casablanca, is certainly an introvert. He is a man of few words, and overtly limits his connections to others, allowing only those he trusts, loves, or respects into his stand-offish world. Because Rick appears to others as an "exclusive club", people around him attempt to gain his favor or respect, and infer or ponder his myriad unspoken sympathies, while he insists that he is completely neutral and non-partisan.

He is clearly far more of a MBTI intuitive than he is a sensitive, and this is proved by the fact that he is keenly aware of patterns and relationships occurring around him. Due to the fact that he is both introverted and intuitive he often sympathetically aids others covertly, all the while feigning impartiality.

On the other hand Rick is deeply feeling (or else he wouldn't be so damaged) and he appears as the consummate MBTI perceiver - capable of extreme spontaneity, like selling his cafe, changing his mind at the last minute and not getting on that plane with Ilsa, or teaming up with Renault for an uncertain new future.

Thus, Rick Blaine is an INFP, unless I'm missing something.

4. William Shakespeare's doomed Danish protagonist "Hamlet" is certainly a classic introvert - so much so that he even attempts to out his uncle's guilt by having a troupe of paid performers imply it through his choice of the play they enact rather than confront him directly and inditing him for the murder of his father. This is a reflection of the fact that Hamlet overthinks everything - and this renders him incapable of truly taking action. This probably stems from the fact that he is a MBTI ultra-sensitive. While he comfortably casts judgement on his seemingly wicked uncle, he is nonetheless hopelessly lost in his own perceptions, and his feelings versus his thoughts end up creating a recurring psychological loop. Based on all of these elements I would argue that Hamlet; Prince of Denmark, is an ISTP, or possibly an ISTJ.

5. To me the villain displaying the most elaborate plan of all time is perhaps Chancellor / Emperor Palpatine of the Star Wars franchise. His over-arching scheme is holistic, intuitive, adaptive, insidious, and highly manipulative. Obviously he is depicted as the epitome of evil in the franchise, and is almost a caricature of it, but if you think about his plan, he relies heavily on his perceptions (including "force visions") in order to choose what path his plan might need to take in order to fulfill his dream of the demise of the Jedi and to cleverly take single-handed control of the galaxy.

Therefore, I submit that Chancellor / Emperor Palpatine is an INTP, and not an INTJ - more at home in the shadows, but forced to be a public figure for the benefit of his end goal. And while he readily passes judgement on the Jedi - deeming them the bad guys in his struggle, his seeming personal hatred and interest in cold revenge is actually based in a much more antiseptic belief in Sith doctrinal supremacy.

CONCLUSION

As you see from the smattering of established characters from film and literature I surveyed, you can ponder the MBTI of other notable fictional characters as well as your own, and it will help you to put them in deeper perspective. This will help you in re-writes and especially if the character appears in an episodic project, where you are developing them over a long time and within a larger story-arc.

Once again, I advise against using the MBTI scale as a part of a character design template, but rather to see it as an useful analytical tool to apply to your characters after you've received them from wherever they come from, and have already put the work in developing them.

Till next time.